Tracking pics downloaded without permission
- Thread starter J Gordon
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HIMUPNORTH
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Very difficult this one. Short answer is no but one thing you can try is lodge some "codes" into your metadata and hopefully when you Google for it you will find any "hotlinked" or re-published images. Once downloaded however you ahve really no control.
A number of mine have been downloaded and used without my permission that I know of, there must be more! Watermarking helps to some extent but can intrude, certainly peeps here don't like them when they obstruct an image.
Keeping to 600pixels rather than the usual 800 can deter users from using your inages.
As to who downloaded them. Virtually impossible to tell unless the hosting provider can give a list of IP addresses but even then they cannot define who viewedd and who may have downloaded.
HTH!
Gary
A number of mine have been downloaded and used without my permission that I know of, there must be more! Watermarking helps to some extent but can intrude, certainly peeps here don't like them when they obstruct an image.
Keeping to 600pixels rather than the usual 800 can deter users from using your inages.
As to who downloaded them. Virtually impossible to tell unless the hosting provider can give a list of IP addresses but even then they cannot define who viewedd and who may have downloaded.
HTH!
Gary
mattyh
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If they're hotlinkling your images there's a cool little edit that you can put into the .htaccess file that changes any hotlinked image to a different one. For example, an image saying "this website steals images from other sites"
Only works on hotlinking though, doesn't track downloaded/saved images, so while it's fun, it's not really any good.
Only works on hotlinking though, doesn't track downloaded/saved images, so while it's fun, it's not really any good.
Adam
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Do you have a guide on how to do this? Many thanks.
mattyh
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I asked a similar question the other day directed to those that had actually done it to find out how they did it and how much time it took but got very little response.
There is a tool from DigiMarc that will do just what you want but it is an annual subscription thing and also very expensive $500 a year for upto 5000 images. There is another service called Picscout which offers a similar service for a monthly fee rather than an annual fee (upto 2000 images for $34.95 a month), these also add a legal service to the mix to attend to get some cash for the stolen image, although it is resticted to searching websites in USA, UK and Germany.
I also found a site suggesting exactly what HIMUPNORTH suggested with the "code" being a long random (and therefore hopefully unique to you) set of letters and numbers. This is effectively free but as you have to do the searches and run arround I wonder how much time it takes hence my post.
There is a tool from DigiMarc that will do just what you want but it is an annual subscription thing and also very expensive $500 a year for upto 5000 images. There is another service called Picscout which offers a similar service for a monthly fee rather than an annual fee (upto 2000 images for $34.95 a month), these also add a legal service to the mix to attend to get some cash for the stolen image, although it is resticted to searching websites in USA, UK and Germany.
I also found a site suggesting exactly what HIMUPNORTH suggested with the "code" being a long random (and therefore hopefully unique to you) set of letters and numbers. This is effectively free but as you have to do the searches and run arround I wonder how much time it takes hence my post.
Kerioak
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Most of the time finding an image that is being used illegally is sheer luck - such as when I found the picture I use for my avatar being sold as a mousemat on ebay. I tend to watermark my images if I put them on websites, the size and number of watermarks dependent on its size and what I ultimately want to do with it.